How To Use Content Marketing for Business Success

Content marketing is the strategy to make your content shine. Businesses need to create content with high-quality that resonates with the area of interest of the users. Relevant content is an invincible tool in the arsenal of B2B marketers that allows marketers to scale-up their marketing strategies for greater sales conversions & paves a sure pathway to business success.

Brand awareness, customer engagement & loyalty, customer education, sales growth, customer retention & retargeting, repurchases & positive word-of-mouth-marketing are just some of the advantages of content marketing which drive business success for B2B brands.

According to a study by Content Marketing Institute, 92% of the marketers reported that their company views content as a business asset.

In another study by the Institute, 56% of the businesses reported that they want to increase the spending on their content creation.

Content doesn't just need to be created from the perspective of putting all the information down for the audiences to see. Marketers must introspect what type of content their ideal persona will be interested in.

Content created should abide by the philosophy of E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness & Trustworthiness) & creating high-quality content should be the priority of marketers.

According to Point Visible, 70% of marketers prioritize content quality over quantity.

This is a progressive approach because a lot of content created online goes waste due to a lack of relevance to the buyer-persona. Also, the constant changes in the Google algorithm have made relevance a non-negotiable parameter to be inculcated in the content strategy.

MarketingProfs defines innovative content as useful, enjoyable & inspired content.

The purpose of content marketing is to amplify the dimension of customer success by creating & sharing relevantly written, downloadable & visually pleasing pieces of content so that your target audience can learn about your brand expertise & products or services. As customers discover tailored solutions to their pain-points this, in turn, leads to business success.

Content marketing enables businesses to solve the pain-points of the customers & thus, facilitates accurate targeting & lead generation for business success.

Following are some of the ways marketers can use content marketing for business success:

1. Define Your Mission & Your Goals:

Even before brands think of setting their mission & goals, they should define what their marketing mission statements are. A mission statement is a brief statement that allows marketers to deduce what’s important in alignment with their vision & how they wish to strive to deliver phenomenal experiences to their customers.

Creating content in resonance with the mission statement allows marketers to form a content strategy that keeps them on track & attracts maximum audience traction.

To come up with a model for business success, marketers need to learn to use content marketing strategies that have been custom-made as per the requirements of the target audience, the pieces of content can be used to reach audience groups & benefits drawn from a consolidated content strategy can be enlisted.

A content strategy articulated to brands’ mission statement should help accomplish the following goals:

• It helps improve the brands’ revenue leading to business success
• Content strategy aligned with mission statement helps in driving more sales
• A well-aligned, tested & optimized content strategy paves the way for boosting website traffic
• Content strategy articulated to the vision of a brand also helps in achieving influencer-level authority & gaining authority within a specific niche. As brands can project themselves as subject-matter-expert within a particular niche, it helps in inspiring confidence in the prospects to expedite their purchase decisions
• A relevant content strategy always helps in achieving SEO success which leads to more traffic
• As your content becomes more effective, it reduces the marketing costs
• Relevant content tailored to prospect’s  needs helps in optimizing social media engagement

2. Define Your KPIs:

The best way to achieve the goals aligned with content marketing is to measure the key performance indicators (KPIs) aligned with the content marketing strategy.

Defining the KPIs aligned with content endeavors & aligning them with the digital & business success metrics of organizations at large helps marketers in scaling content marketing for business success.

Aligning the business KPIs related to content marketing endeavors with business KPIs of brands at large also helps in measuring the ROI related to content endeavors.

3. Know Your Audience:

A successful content marketing strategy is all about creating the right pieces of content to reach your audience. Knowing the audiences well also scales up the process of targeting as the audiences can be provided with the right pieces of content at the right time.

The marketers need to collect the following data about their target audience groups:

• Collection of Demographic data
• Tracking customer feedback to create user-generated content
• Targeting can further be refined based on the firmographic, technographic, psychographic & past browsing history of the customers across omnichannel & accordingly pieces of content can be created
• Content needs to be delivered across omnichannel to the prospects for targeting as well as the retargeting campaigns to be designed

4. Creating buyer personas:

If markets have demographic & customer feedback data, they can be used to flesh out the buyer personas. Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of ideal customer profiling across omnichannel.

Figuring out the ideal personas not only helps to create specific pieces of content to attract, engage, convert & retain audiences, but also helps, marketers, to expand their persona base by keeping a track record of audience mirroring & the look-alike audiences.

Generating high-quality leads & prospects paves the way for business success.

5. Employ the Right Forms of Content:

The year 2020 is a year of video marketing & podcasting. No other form of content can beat the effectiveness of videos in story-telling. Similarly, podcasts are also an impactful way of creative storytelling that can be leveraged by the marketers for branding & reflecting on the value proposition of goods or services.

According to Animoto, 85% of marketers state that videos are an effective way to get online attention. Also, another independent research from Animoto substantiates that video ads are #1 way to discover customers for the brands who would later buy from them.

Podcasts are also highly effective means of driving conversions. They serve as an active platform to engross audience attention.

Podcasts are another impactful way to tell brand stories.

According to Edison Research, an estimated 73 billion people listen to podcasts each month.

The proliferation of podcasts as an effective means to engross audiences is particularly visible in the United States.

According to research by Nielsen, 50% of all US homes listen to podcasts.

Podcasts are audio-essays delving into current events, hobbies, obscure facts, philosophy, history, music & much more & keep the brands’ customers intrigued.

The marketers should also stick to an agile content strategy to gain maximum traction from their marketing endeavors.

Read more on 13 Ways Agile Content Marketing Benefits B2B Enterprises

Wrapping Things Up

Content creation is an effective way to attract, engage, convert & retain the customers. The realm of content marketing is always changing. Specific forms of content tend to fetch higher returns than others.

According to HubSpot, 55% of decision-makers consider writing a blog on their top content marketing priority.

When used correctly, content marketing helps organizations realize their short & long-term business goals. Brand awareness, better customer engagement & loyalty, customer education, sales growth, talent recruitment & omnichannel reputation management are some of the vital marketing goals accomplished through content marketing that fuel business success.